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Parking Garage Of The Future

Posted by timothy on from the ferris-bueller-would-be-pleased dept.

Spunk writes "Like something out of the Jetsons, this NYTimes article [no-reg link] describes a parking garage that automatically stores cars in a 3-dimensional grid, and retrieves them when you return. Europe and Asia have several already."

16 of 111 comments (clear)

  1. Japan has used them for years... by orn · · Score: 2, Interesting

    When in Japan for work, I found these at lots of buildings. I thought of them as car vending machines - stick a ticket in, get a car out.

    They even used a giant motorized lazy susan to turn your car around for you.

    What a great country.

    --
    1. 2.
  2. Re:Not much new here... by Mattcelt · · Score: 2, Interesting

    And boy, I wonder how they handle rush hour with a system like this... What if all 324 people want to get out at the same time?

    324 cars
    *2.5 mins/car

    /2 elevators
    =405 minutes or 6.75 hours to get them all!

  3. another solution by Parsec · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Would be to ban large vehicles from the city. Only allow one or two-person mini-vehicles in, while every SUV has to park on the border and take public transportation. It wouldn't be a politically popular move, but it would be space and fuel efficient.

    1. Re:another solution by Parsec · · Score: 2, Interesting

      One way to ban large vehicles, would be to only fund / build parking for mini-vehicles. Sure you could drive around in your SUV, but there's nowhere to park the thing.

    2. Re:another solution by Chilles · · Score: 2, Informative

      You have this in/around a lot of city centres here in the Netherlands.
      Shops, businesses and residents of a restricted area get a drive-in permit (for delivery) (and maybe one parking space) all public transport is allowed in (buses and cabs) and everybody else can park on the edge. Vehicles that are allowed in get a pass that unblocks the roads into and out of the system.
      solid metal blocks block the roads and can sink down when needed, controlled from some control centre that you can call and by some automatic card system that I don't really know.

      When the traffic get's more troublesome it's probably worth the trouble :)

    3. Re:another solution by jonm · · Score: 2, Interesting
      Why don't you all take one bus instead?

      Was that so hard?

    4. Re:another solution by flikx · · Score: 2, Informative

      There's one problem with that. There are a lot of stairs and steep hills in my city, and my Suburban can crawl over more features while the bus takes the long way around. People don't realize how useful 4WD is in an urban environment.

      --
      One future, two choices. Oppose them or let them destroy us.
  4. Wuhoh by kurosawdust · · Score: 2, Funny
    Oh christ - as if we didnt have enough trouble with people forgetting "Section 7 - Orange" when they go to the mall...

    "Honey where are we parked?"
    "space 3-16-47...or was that 3-17-46??"

  5. Re:Not much new here... by fm6 · · Score: 2, Interesting
    ...what happens when the power goes out, like it did in the mid-atlantic states this past week?
    You're screwed, of course. Just like the people who couldn't get their cars out of our company garage during the last blackout. Supposedly there was a way to operate the security curtains without power, but the guy who knew how to do it was off that week. Being dangerously dependent on technology that goes away with the first infrastructure glitch is nothing new.

    I seem to recall seeing one of these in a 50s crime movie. Not that Jetsony. Now if the cars were held up by magnetic levitation. Oops, there's that power issue again...

  6. Murphy by madkow · · Score: 2, Funny

    Welcome to the fully automated garage. Step awy from your car and rest assured that nothing can go wrong ... go wrong ... go wrong ...

  7. Why they're used. by Chilles · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The main reason these things are used (in europe) is space.
    My dad is an expert on various car park solutions, mainly to let people "store" (park) their car somewhere at the edge of a city to use public transport to get to the centre (so called transferia). And he traveled around the world looking at how other cities/nations did this. He found that in europe solutions focus on using as little space as possible for as much cars as possible, which naturally led to this system. In the states however, the usual solution to this problem was taking a huge slab of land, covering it with some concrete or asphalt, throw a bus/subway/train station in the middle and call it a transferium. The US will get these things when empty land becomes as rare and expensive as it is now in most areas of europe.
    Which may never happen because malls (easily accessible by car) fulfill much of the functions for americans that city centres fulfill for europeans, so The US has fewer areas where lots of people need to go that are nearly impossible to get to by car. Maybe when people get fed-up with walking hundreds of metres across a huge car-park to the nearest mall entrance?

    1. Re:Why they're used. by Henry+V+.009 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Kunstler is always a good authority on this kind of thing (he believes that American cities are wretched wastelands devoted to the worship of the automobile). Here is an article in which he compares how Europeans walk a lot more than Americans because they have the kind of cities that make walking possible (and enjoyable). Big and Blue in the USA

      Here is his website: http://www.kunstler.com/index.html His "Clusterfuck Nation" ongoing commentary is worthy of a bookmark, even from a right-winger like me.

    2. Re:Why they're used. by ckaminski · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I gotta tell ya, living near Boston has been an interesting ride/walk the past couple weekends. I've been in and out of town hundreds and hundreds of times, but it wasn't until two weeks ago that I actually walked across town. From BU to the Aquarium, via Copley Square and the Commons. Bar hopping.

      Did it again last weekend for the Freedom Rally (aka Hemp Fest). This town is relatively easy to walk around in (not if you're in a hurry, I guess)... Even Chicago wasn't too bad on foot. An hour and a half puts you almost anywhere you want to go.

      Americans are just lazy.

  8. That won't work -- I've seen what happens by GuyMannDude · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I grew up in a fairly progressive midwestern city and they tried something similar. They wanted to encourage people to use public transportation to go down to the center of town. That's where the state capital was and also the university (which had a student population of 35K-40K). To "encourage" everyone to take the bus downtown, they severely limited parking and made State Street a no-car street (buses, bikes and cops were the only things that could go down it).

    Anyhow, even with these measures, people never learned to ride the bus. They refused to carpool. They continued to drive downtown. Parking was a nightmare. Eventually the city had to cave in and build parking structures down there because things were getting out of hand. Of course, since the downtown had originally been designed to avoid parking structures, adding them in after the fact was difficult, time consuming and expensive. But the voters demanded it.

    I don't mean to rag on you Parsec, but I think your ideas of encouraging transportation habits by engineering are naive.

    GMD

    --
    watch this
  9. Point A to point B by randito · · Score: 2, Insightful
    People get so obsessed with how they get from point A to point B, that sometimes they forget what point A and B are. If point A was designed properly, getting to point B would suddenly become much less important.

    In the debate over public vs private transport, people overlook WHY there is so much traffic in the first place.

    Low density suburbs with no commercial or industrial space cannot support mass transit. They barely have the tax base to support basic amenities like roads, police, sewers, water and firestations. It is a no-brainer that a high density neighbourhoods like those found in Manhattan, Tokyo or many European cities can support a lot more amenities per capita than can your typical American suburb. A city block like mine with 20 buildings each with 150 units has the same sewers, water pipes, telephone lines and other infrastructure under the street as any suburb. A look at policing cost will show that the neighbourhood is partly self-policing too.

    When I moved into this neighbourhood (the West End of Vancouver, Canada), I quicky found that my car was useless. There is no parking anywhere for more than 2 hours at a time without a permit. Once I got my permit, the car didn't move from that spot for over a month. EVERYTHING is in walking distance. From specialty grocery stores to incredible restaurants to the commercial district for work, to bars, to the beach and forest (one block away), there is no need to drive. The only exception is the mountains for snowboarding, which take 45 mins by public transit or 25 min by car. Not worth the cost of owning a car! Needless to say, after three months, I sold the car and saved over $500 CDN /month, three quarters of the cost of my rent! That was seven years ago. Never looked back.

    Part of the reason this neighbourhood developed the way it did is out of necessity. Long ago the city of Vancouver decided that they would never build a freeway. The suburbs built them, but they promptly end at the border of Vancouver. Parking is also limited. This makes driving in Vancouver difficult, to say the least. A city of only 2 million, we also have invested in 2 subway lines and we are building a third. This is not so much to help people get from existing neighbourhoods into downtown, as to to encourge more high density neighbourhoods to cluster around the stations.

    In short, increasing population density is the solution to many of the problems facing American cities today. Counter-intuitively, lack of transportation can actually encourage good urban planning. Dense neighbourhoods save the government money , and save the consumer money. It is a win-win situation. Suburbs are simply, unsustainable. Want to fix the transportation problem? Don't build any more transportation infrastructure. Just loosen your zoning laws so developers can build up instead of out, stop subsidizing new developments farther out in the burbs, and let the marker do the rest.

  10. Cabs are different from personal cars... by Tau+Zero · · Score: 2, Interesting
    in that they take up far less parking space per ride. Even if the cab is only carrying one rider at a time, it is carrying far more riders on an average day and it still takes only one space at the taxi stand.

    When the day's activities are over, the driver of the car has to get to the car and get it out of there. The person who rode the cab in can just as easily take the bus out.

    Don't get me wrong, I'm a dedicated driver and I can barely get along without a car. But I'm not about to sell buses and cabs short on their strong points, and parking and road congestion are darn good ones in their favor.

    --
    Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.